MDHA

Nashville's housing authority is in preliminary talks with Fisk University to co-develop its campus along with a nearby public housing complex, an official said Monday at a Metro Council budget hearing.

Nashville has taken a big step forward in its plans to overhaul the city's aging public housing. It involves transferring federal property over to the housing authority itself, which means the city's housing agency now owns the James A. Cayce public housing projects outright — for the first time ever since it was built in 1939.

The culprit was unknown, but it was likely Lizzie, Darcy or Tux, three cats who hang around the Metropolitan Development Housing Agency's administration buildings in the James Cayce homes. They're fed by staff. They've even been fixed and vaccinated.

2018 is going to be a big year for public housing. Nashville will be renovating, or planning renovations, for four public housing developments — The James Cayce homes in East Nashville, the Edgehill Homes in South Nashville and the JC Napier and Sudekum apartments, just south of downtown. All together they're home to about 5,000 people.

The Metro Housing Board moved ahead on a plan to pay for the construction of a $25-million-dollar East Nashville charter school. It's an unprecedented financing move that opens up the agency to risk by acting as both the developer and the lender for the project.

Nashville's housing authority took a major step toward creating the city's new vision of public housing, which hopes to break up blocks of concentrated poverty with varying levels of income. Metro broke ground Wednesday on a new mixed-income building in East Nashville's James Cayce Homes. Called Kirkpatrick Park, it will be the first of its kind in the neighborhood.

In the next step of a federal initiative called ConnectHome, Nashville officials are trying to come up with an Internet access plan to get more families in public housing online.

Metro’s housing agency, MDHA, is essentially writing up a blueprint of everything that could be done to provide more low-income school-aged children with Internet access. MDHA’s chief operating officer, Ben Bentley, says this includes pinpointing partners who can teach basic Internet skills to public housing residents.